Next Chicago ALT.NET meeting will bring a practical look at F#, showing that it does not need to be seen as a niche language.

F# Outside the Lab

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

It seems that almost every time we hear about F# being used it is always in a experimental setting or in a niche application. Maybe that's a common trait that F# shares with many other functional programming languages and its roots in the Microsoft Research labs.

Alex Pedenko has been exploring uses for F# for day-to-day programming tasks and he will be sharing his experience with the group in this talk.

Alex will start with a quick introduction to F# but it would work best if you could at least skimmed over some tutorial or video just to get the basic syntax and feel of the language.

Alex has been in software development for about 13 years, starting off on Borland Delphi, then spending about 4 years in Java and finally making the switch to .net around '03

Currently, he is the director of software architecture and chief architect at a healthcare services company. He has used that role as an opportunity to inject some modern ideas into an otherwise lagging industry, moving the company from a classic "giant web-app strapped to an even more giant db", to a distributed, service-oriented environment utilizing RESTful services, and rich-client applications.

He has spent roughly 6 months researching f#, its applicability to business systems, and viability in a commercial environment.

He adds:

I like long walks on the beach... er.. wait, that's for a different site :)

7:45 pm

Time for our monthly open discussion (if the 1st portion doesn't run late). Functional programming, either in a real functional language or in C#, JavaScript, Ruby, etc, which support some of the same constructs, is making inroads on software development. Is it the next big thing or just one more thing in our toolbox?

There are still a few seats left for the next Chicago ALT.NET meeting. The meeting is on April 8^th and we will have a demonstration of FitNesse by Robert Martin.

FitNesse is used by many people for acceptance testing and many in our group wanted to understand it better. So come and see what this is all about.

Collaborative Acceptance Testing with FitNesse

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

Robert Martin is back, this time to talk about FitNesse, an Acceptance Testing turned into Wiki framework built on top of Fit.

Who else would you want to see talking about FitNesse? Uncle Bob, was one of its creators and is its maintainer. In this session he will explain what Acceptance Testing, Fit and FitNesse are, why they are useful and how to best use FitNesse in your process.

He'll also show off Slim, the new test-system that supersedes Fit and enables a whole hose of new features and capabilities.

Robert C. Martin has been a software professional since 1970. In the last 35 years, he has worked in various capacities on literally hundreds of software projects. He has authored "landmark" books on Agile Programming, Extreme Programming, UML, Object-Oriented Programming, and C++ Programming. He has published dozens of articles in various trade journals. Today, He is one of the software industry's leading authorities on Agile software development and is a regular speaker at international conferences and trade shows. He is a former editor of the C++ Report and currently writes a monthly Craftsman column for Software Development magazine.

Mr. Martin is the founder, CEO, and president of Object Mentor Incorporated. Object Mentor is a sister company to Object Mentor International. Like OMI, Object Mentor is comprised of highly experienced software professionals who provide process improvement consulting, object-oriented software design consulting , training, and development services to major corporations around the world.

7:45 pm

Time for our monthly open discussion. Aside from any specific topic that anyone wants to bring to the group, we can continue the discussion on Acceptance Testing and report the progress on the effort to produce the Chicago Code Camp.

In the next meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET users group we will try an Open Space format — or rather maybe I should say a format with some characteristics of Open Spaces given our time and space constraints.

If you haven't been to a meeting held in this format, maybe you think this sounds crazy. I'd encourage you to see it for yourself. The meeting will be on March 11^th.

Open Space

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

This month we will have an Open Space-inspired meeting. Open Spaces are considered an effective meeting layout to find solutions to problems that would benefit from a wide range of opinions.

We don't have enough time to do a full-blown Open Spaces event so we will cut some corners. Here's the plan:

• If you have a software development issue (code, design, process, human, etc) that you can't seem to figure out on your own or within your immediate team, bring to the meeting.
• We will have a few minutes for participants to announce their problem and put on the board
• Since we only have time for one session, we all will vote to choose the issue we will discuss
• The issue "author" is expected to facilitate and stir the discussion
• The group can decide the format of the session (panel, fishbowl, moderated, etc)

If the session, for whatever reason, ends too soon we can pick another issue to discuss.

So, come ready with some issue, willing to participate in the discussions, or even just to watch others tackle the problem.

After his presentation, Robert stayed a little more answering questions from the audience.

Here's my small contribution to the current avalanche of Uncle Bob references in the .NET world.

This video was recorded at the February's meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET group. This is the presentation that he will be giving as a keynote speech at the SD West conference next month.

The Q&A part of the meeting has also been recorded.